Earlier this year we published a demo app showcasing our port of Node.js with ChakraCore to iOS. In the accompanying blog article, we talked about how Node-ChakraCore opened a unique opportunity for Node.js to work on iOS, and consequently a path for Node.js to become a viable building block for mobile applications.

The engineering team at Janea Systems has continued to work hard and passionately on this project; so today, we are excited to announce the first alpha release of Node.js for Mobile Apps: a toolkit that enables developers to harvest the power of Node.js and its module ecosystem in their mobile applications. At the heart of it, is a library – available for Android and iOS – that allows an app to host a full-fledged Node.js execution environment. In addition to the core library, we have released plugins for Cordova and React Native – both also compatible with Android and iOS – which make it extremely easy to integrate the Node.js runtime into applications built using on those frameworks.

I figured I could weigh in as well, focusing on around the last decade, which, coincidentally, is how old CSS-Tricks is. That just about matches up with my experience in the industry.

It’s no doubt that Firefox was a major player in giving us the web we have today. Just a few years after Firefox’s 2004 debut, Firebug was introduced in 2006.

It’s not an overstatement to say that all modern day DevTools are modeled after Firebug. The influence Firebug had over web development was huge.

DevTools these days are almost taken for granted. They are the primary way we interact with how our code ends up in browsers, but that wasn’t always the case. Before Firebug, there was a whole lot of View Source and essentially guessing what was going on behind the scenes. Firebug made us all far better developers, and it’s influence is still doing that.

Flexbox adds a level of control to our layouts that we didn't really have before, we hacked our floats and clearfixed, we fought whitespace with inline-block, pushed display:table, and even stretched content with position:absolute. We no longer need to rely on these solutions beyond providing something visual to browsers without flex features. Flex's features will add an important set of tools to how we build, not by replacing what was there before, but improving upon how we build today.

The major challenge that I see with Flexbox is that there's a distinct gap between what we build today and how we'll approach tomorrow. The prevailing attitude seems to be “Not for another x years”, or “we'll wait for X browser to catch up”, but we don't need to think like this anymore.

Today we are thrilled to announce WebKit support for WebRTC, available on Safari on macOS High Sierra, iOS 11, and Safari Technology Preview 32. In this post, we will go through an overview of our implementation. We will have future posts that cover more best practices for developers.

When talking about WebRTC, we immediately think about making a video conference call. There are two steps to start a call. First, WebKit needs access to the user’s camera and microphone. HTTPS websites use the Media Capture and Streams API on Safari for that purpose. Once the user grants permission through a prompt, capture streams start to flow. These streams can be tailored to websites’ needs through the use of

There are some internet trends we choose not to speak of. They harken back to an era when the rules of web design and etiquette were yet to be written; when the limits of what could be done were few, and when the term “taste” was interpreted more liberally than it is today. We refer to this time as the 90s.

Although there are some trends from this era we’d like to leave dead and buried, others have been remastered and are back in vogue. Today we revisit 13 terrible trends from the 90s, and how you can implement them on your site.

Greeting visitors

In the 90s the internet, in many ways, felt like one giant chatroom. Often you’d arrive on a site only to be greeted by a big, bold “Welcome To My Site!” (exclamation point necessary).